grad school

[Ralph Howard]

> 
> On Thu, 5 Dec 1996, Meg Larson wrote:
> 
> > I'm getting ready to send off app's for grad school; maybe I shouldn't?
> > And just how much of an asshole do ya have ta be to get thru grad school,
> > and is it an acquired skill? . . . 
> > 

To which most of the replies somewhat negative to outright hostile to
post graduate education.

I hate to make myself look superficial by having anything good to say
about graduate school, but I believe that I and the majority of my
classmates got a lot of it.  There was the general feeling that the
subject was worth doing and many of the faculty were good about
getting us involved in seminars and generally helping us see how
research was done, and how to write it up.  I even found several of
the other students helpful (there was a subject we wanted to learn and
we ran our own seminar on it).

This is not to say that it was easy.  There where certainly a few
people (both faculty and students) that qualified as assholes and I
would have enjoyed things more on a decent living wage.  But I would
not want to discourage anyone with a strong interest in a subject from
graduate school provided they go in with realistic expectations on the
job market once they are done.

I do have to confess that maybe part of the good feeling I have about
grad school is because the faculty club sold cheap beer to graduate
students on credit.

Ralph


-- 
Ralph Howard                    Phone:  (803) 777-2913 
Department of Mathematics       Fax:    (803) 777-3783 
University of South Carolina    e-mail: howard at math.sc.edu
Columbia, SC 29208 USA          http://www.math.sc.edu/~howard/